22 NUART JOURNAL 2019 VOLUME 2 NUMBER 1 22–31 BEFORE AND AFTER: THE LIVEABLE CITY Andreas Petrossiants Independent Scholar, New York While graffiti was once a prominent justification for broken-windows policing, it now serves as a key marker for neighbourhoods that may generate astronomical profits from the processes of gentrification and human displacement. In the context of urban planning that privileges the exchange value of the built environment over its use value, this article compares two fundamentally different examples: 1) a direct action undertaken via tagging in 2019, and 2) a two-channel projection of film stills by New York-based artist Peter Scott exhibited in 2016. This comparison serves to negotiate how nostalgia may be understood in relation to the continuous struggle for dignified housing. The examples cited here are discussed to consider whether nostalgia can function as a tool for reading the past, and to develop strategies for the present. Within the realm of cultural production, there is still much to be said about how one may appropriate from the past without fetishizing losses, especially while the larger culture industry works in tandem with state and corporate powers to make such losses palatable. How do forms of resistance or cultural production operate long after they have been recuperated? How do such strategies work when they reappear, or are reused, as part of a collective cultural language? As revolutionary critique engages in battle on the very terrain of the cinematic spectacle, it must thus turn the language of that medium against itself and give itself a form that is itself revolutionary. – Guy Debord, Original Announcement for his film Society of the Spectacle, 1974 A lot of trains, a lot of fun, a lot of art. Art that's gonna be part of New York City's history forever. – Iz the Wiz, Style Wars, 1983 Nobody is going to rebuild your community. If they do, when they finish, it won't be your community anymore. – Zellie Imani, Twitter Post, 2019 BEFORE AND AFTER: THE LIVEABLE CITY 23 1. THE BEAUTIFICATION OF THE STREET: forming tenants' unions, for example, is still crucial to FROM STREET ART TO ADVERTISEMENT organising rent strikes and fighting against displacement. There is no shortage of documentation of street art But within the realm of cultural production, there is still on image heaps such as Instagram or Pinterest that much to be said about how one may appropriate from the consolidate tagged spectacles into algorithmic sinkholes. past without fetishising losses, especially when the larger Pictures1 that come to mind: celebrities on the New York culture industry works in tandem with the ruling class to City subway in the 1970s; large murals in European cities make such losses palatable, or even desired. With regard maintaining the aesthetic of ‘influence’ of the moment, a to the latter case, consider the way US city governments watered-down commodity critique for example; before got tangled up in a humiliating fight to win Amazon's bid and after images of urban blight and its sterilised neoliberal for its second headquarters: a wolf of hyper-gentrification maturation after having been ‘flipped’ and ‘greened’; and brand-takeover in the sheep's clothing of ‘mutually advertisements masquerading as street art gracing the beneficial development’ and ‘jobs’. In NYC, municipal and sides of luxury condos – publicity flattened onto the corporate propaganda promoting the city's exalted creative neighbourhood.2 Contemporaneous with the early years capital cultivated major support for the deal, which was of neoliberalism and its incumbent austerity and dissolution ultimately defeated because of popular resistance and of class composition, graffiti was a central justification for sustained protest. broken-windows policing. Some decades later, under the Stein begins his historicisation of urban planning and regimes of creative, surveillance capitalism, neighbourhoods displacement with the early twentieth-century planning decorated with street art – particularly in North America movement ‘City Beautiful’, which he remarks was likely the and Western Europe3 – are the most prone to be somewhere first such movement in the US. Organised in 1909, ‘before in the process of either investment, disinvestment, or all else, however, City Beautiful was a real estate program reinvestment to ensure rising land value and luxury that sought to attract investment by building massive, Beaux development – the urbanist component of what Neil Smith Arts-inspired municipal buildings, tree-lined boulevards refers to as ‘global urban strategy’ (2002). The violence of and carefully manicured open spaces’ (2019: 19). The human displacement is the continuous given to the stages normalisation and incorporation of this strategy is of course of this process throughout. As has been discussed recently, by now intuitive to most inhabitants of urban environments. this crucial component of urban planning is at times An obvious continuation of City Beautiful is ‘greening’, which understated in literature on gentrification, which some by many is understood as a form of justifying the displacement argue may have become ‘gentrified itself’.4 of people of colour and working class communities under Among the many approaches to gentrification, a the guise of making improvements to their neighbourhoods particularly elegant formulation is provided by geographer by way of introducing parks, ‘sustainable’ architecture, new Ipsita Chatterjee (2014, cited in Stein: 41), namely ‘the theft infrastructure, and the like. Exemplary is a conversation of space from labor and its conversion into spaces of profit’. Stein cites between preservationist Michael Henry Adams Integral to this process is the eradication of public space and young people in Harlem which points to the growing and its expropriation by the private sector into ‘public- consciousness that these ostensibly publicly-beneficial private partnerships': from the ubiquitous and ostensibly schemes are in fact tools of the developer class. Adams invisibilised privatisation of public parks and public housing, recounts that when speaking with the children about the to the more visible examples such as the Google's takeover greening of their block, one of them remarked: ‘You see, I of swaths of Toronto to build a ‘smart city’ and New York's told you they didn't plant those trees for us’ (Adams, cited LINKNYC Wi-Fi-booths that acted as unregulated data in Stein, 2019: 40). mines.5 The heavily state-subsidised luxury development There are parallels to be drawn between the and techno-surveillance apparatus at Hudson Yards is beautification methods used a century ago to explicitly another odious example.6 segregate communities by race and class, and the implicit Among the more recent literature on gentrification and slightly more invisibilised forms this takes today, and displacement, Samuel Stein's new book, Capital City: including ‘Disneyfication’ (Times Square in New York is Gentrification and the Real Estate State discusses urban the prime example); the eradication of public space; and planning and the incumbent contradictions inherent in its the brutal criminalisation of unhoused people.8 Returning efforts to ensure social reproduction while remaining to the intimate connections between planners and this beholden to increasing land value and defending private violence, Stein summarises: property. Taking NYC – where there are three times as many empty apartments as unhoused people7 – as an But it is not only owners who inflict this pain. Just example, Stein discusses displacement and gentrification as gentrification's violence is no metaphor, neither as key tools in the urban planner's toolkit. is planners’ ‘police power’. […] With increased It is in this wider context that I propose to compare resources, police are mirroring planners by speaking two fundamentally different examples: 1) a direct action the language of data-informed decision-making and undertaken via tagging in 2019, and 2) a two-channel adopting the tools of geographic information systems projection of film stills by New York-based artist Peter to target their activities. (2019: 76) Scott exhibited in 2016 to negotiate how nostalgia may be understood in relation to the continuous struggle for dignified Much discussed in recent years is another method housing. This text is neither an attempt to analyse the of beautification: artwashing. Whether taking the form of struggles for housing justice, nor is it a study of street art's studio space subsidised by developers or real estate- operations in such struggles. Rather, in placing these two sponsored commissions for previously criminalised street examples next to one another, among others, this text artists, artwashing is a key tool in reproducing creative seeks to examine whether nostalgia can function as a tool capitalism's sites of ‘play’. The recent arrest of Sheefy for adequately reading the past, to develop strategy for the McFly in Detroit is a telling example. McFly had been present, or otherwise as a conceptual posture. Clearly, commissioned to paint ten murals as part of the 2017 ‘City age-old tools, both successful and not, remain useful; Walls’ programme, which had been organised to pay artists 24 NUART JOURNAL stipends to create ‘public art in vandalism-prone areas in (2019) writes that the settlement ‘signaled a strange new an effort to help deter graffiti’ (Edwards, 2019). While chapter in the history of graffiti. In the early days, by creed, working on the first of the ten murals, he was arrested for a graffiti artist would ask neither for permission nor not having his permit. McFly described the altercation as, compensation. Now, after courting the former, artists at ‘an oxymoron – doing something for the city and being 5Pointz were receiving the latter.’ She cites a salient point arrested by the city’ (cited in Hooper, 2019). On the contrary, made by Meres One, lead plaintiff in the suit against Wolkoff: this contradiction is in fact integral to such forms of ‘Graffiti can ruin a neighborhood, it turns out – just not the artwashing.